


The Iceberg

by Arazsya



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Statement
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-01
Updated: 2017-11-01
Packaged: 2019-01-28 03:14:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12596912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arazsya/pseuds/Arazsya
Summary: Statement of Angharad Wilson, regarding the disappearance of her brother. Original statement given July 16th 2011.





	The Iceberg

**Author's Note:**

> Set at some point in S1, likely before Colony. Written for the Piles of Nonsense challenge - happy Hallowe'en! I wanted to write an unfamiliar perspective on a familiar event, so I hope I haven't made things too vague.

Statement of Angharad Wilson, regarding the disappearance of her brother. Original statement given July 16th 2011. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

I’m really sorry. I’m taking far too long, aren’t I? I should’ve planned out what I was going to write before I came. I bet that’s what everyone else does. Everyone else must be in and out like a shot, and I’ve just been sitting here agonising over it for fifteen minutes. Not that I’m counting. Well. I am counting, obviously. I’m not supposed to. My therapist says I shouldn’t time myself. Are you timing me? You keep walking past the doorway like you’re checking how I’m doing, keep asking if I’d like a cup of tea. I keep saying no, because I didn’t want to be here this long. Sorry, that sounds... you’ve been nothing but hospitable. It’s just that your building has quite a few cobwebs. Lots that I’ve seen, and lots of places where I would probably see some if I looked. Lots of corners.

I haven’t seen any spiders yet. Yet. You know, I read somewhere that the average home contains at least one hundred spiders. The _average home_. There must be dozens in my house that I’ve never even seen. Imagine how many this place has, with all those angles for them to hide in. And the longer I’m here, the greater the likelihood that I’m going to encounter one, and then I’ll need to find someone to help me with it because I can’t even get close enough to the damn things to trap them. And then they’ll see that I haven’t written anything yet, and by the time they get here the spider will be gone anyway and I won’t be able to concentrate on anything else but the spaces where it might be.

And now I’ve gone and written two totally irrelevant paragraphs, just because I was worried you’d walk past again and see that I still wasn’t writing. Maybe you can ignore them? I might go back at the end and cross them out. This one, too, I suppose.

You said to write it down and I’m trying, I _am_ , but it’s been twenty minutes now and I’ve spent them babbling about spiders and trying not to tap. Sorry if I’ve been tapping. I’ll stop if I notice. But there are a lot of things I don’t notice. I used to think I was so aware of things, you know? So observant. But now everything’s the tip of the iceberg and spiders I’ve never seen.

I think the problem I’m having is that I’m not really sure when it started. I’m trying to start at the beginning, but if this _began_ , it did so when I wasn’t looking. I mean, there were events. Those started. There’s the night David vanished, but that doesn’t make sense without the day he and Nia met. Not that it makes much sense even with that. I can’t really start with when I first met Nia, or even David. The police certainly seemed to expect me to, even though everything I remember up until they met was mundane – I didn’t know what would be pertinent to their inquiries, so I should just tell them everything, they said. But I’ve been aware of David as long as I’ve been aware of anything, and if I tried to get all of that down on paper, I expect I’d be here long enough to encounter every spider in the building. It wasn’t feasible then, and it isn’t feasible now. I suppose they were just looking for the beginning, same as me.

The best context I can offer is that David was my brother. We weren’t particularly close growing up. Weren’t into the same things. Looking back, he wasn’t very nice to me, but at the time I just assumed that was normal. My therapist says it wasn’t. I don’t know, I’ve never been in anyone else’s family. He got better. Had a girlfriend at one point who’d been in much the same situation as I had, and after that, he wasn’t quite so sadistic about anything anymore. By the time he went away to university, we – well, we still weren’t friends, but I did miss him for a few weeks, until I got used to him not being there.

He was not there a lot after he left. Didn’t come home much. Thriving social life, new girlfriend, the usual sorts of stuff. I think. I didn’t go to university myself. Didn’t want to. My parents think it was down to seeing Rhys, my other brother, with his English degree, working at the same supermarket as the people who’d stayed home. The qualifications meaning less, or something. And maybe that was in there, somewhere, but what actually decided me was one of the few times that we drove up to see David. We were helping him move his things from his university accommodation into a shared house with his friends for second year. And I know it sounds stupid, that it probably wasn’t a good reason not to go, but that house made me feel sick.

It was terraced, crushed in between two other near-identical houses. All of them had once been done over with white paint and pebble-dashing, but now they were moss-mottled and veined with dirt. The curtains were drawn across all the windows. Mum had a go at David over that, something to do with natural light and vitamin D, but I would have made the same decision. Anyone walking past would be able to see inside easily otherwise. Someone could stand on the pavement and just watch you going about your business.

It only got worse when we went inside. The moment that the door opened, I could hear the people next door having some sort of party. Maybe it was a moving-in celebration or someone’s birthday. But I could hear their music through the wall, and not just the bass line or the drum beat, the whole thing. I could hear them trying to sing along, all strong and confident for the chorus and mumbling through the verses.

If I could hear them that clearly, they must be able to hear us too.

I didn’t say a lot, especially after next door switched off their music. I imagined that it was suddenly quiet enough for them to hear us breathing.

Mum asked about the neighbours. David said the people who’d been having the party were more students, and that no one had moved in on the other side yet, not that he knew of. I didn’t like the idea that someone could be there without him knowing. Surely, he would have heard. Doors closing, opening, stairs creaking. Or perhaps the neighbours were creeping about, moving through a house so very similar to David’s one as silently as they could, listening, swivel-eared and careful-footed.

Nonsense, of course. But the house felt watched, and moving the rest of David’s boxes inside wasn’t enough activity to stop my brain skipping about all over the place, even though we had to Tetris his them so we could fit them around all the junk that was there already. Left over from the previous tenants, David said. It was mostly furniture. Shelves and lampshades and bins, all with several layers of dust. The dining table that we hunched around with our takeaway pizza in the evening. The tablecloth was filthy, and Dad reached for it as if he was going to bundle it into the washing machine that very second, lifted the corner, stared at whatever was underneath for a long moment, apparently decided it was worse, and let it drop again.

I watched a money spider as it trekked painstakingly across the centre of the table, and when I chewed my pizza, I pretended that eating had nothing to do with the concept of nausea, and certainly wouldn’t worsen it at all.

As we drove home again, I heard Dad saying that, as student digs went, it wasn’t the worst he’d ever seen. That was when I knew I wasn’t going.

I met Nia Joseph on my first day of sixth form, while David was still in first year. She was in my history class, and at first I attached myself to her because I needed someone who already knew their way around to make sure that I didn’t get lost. After two weeks we were inseparable. Friends. Talked about things in the same way, picked up one another’s mannerisms without noticing, said the same words at the same time. She came over a lot, to work on projects and watch shows, and she’d always got on well with my family – my parents and Rhys. I think I might have mentioned David, once or twice, but only ever as my other brother. He was always the other brother. Maybe I didn’t talk about him, I don’t know. Is it possible to have a best friend but never mention your brother to them? My memory was never as good as hers. But I do know for a fact that she didn’t meet him. Not until he came home for Christmas in second year.

It was a rushed visit on Nia’s part. We hadn’t seen each other to exchange gifts, because she had family on her mum’s side in London she’d been staying with for December, and was about to go and see her father’s side in Wrexham for the New Year. She had time to stop in for one evening in early January. I met her at the bus stop, and it was like she’d never been away. All the old rhythms were still there. We were talking as we made our way back to the house, inside, the sort of talking that doesn’t have any silence in it because one person’s words slot so well into the other’s that there aren’t any gaps. It was probably the last moment that everything was fine, but it must have started before that. I’m sure of it. Things like that don’t just happen without any warning. The police expected more from me.

We walked into the kitchen, and Nia saw David for what must have been the first time. And she just stopped. Everything else seemed to stop around her. Everything except David. He carried on tidying away the Christmas decorations for a few seconds longer, the tinsel coiling around his hands as he packed it back into its box. And then he stopped too, and turned around. He had this smile on his face. It was one I hadn’t seen for a very long time. The one he used to get when we were both younger, the bullying smile, all teeth even though it didn’t show any. It would always be right there on his face just before he said or did something spiky.

He didn’t say anything, and the smile was gone so quickly that I thought I’d imagined it.

Nia was still stopped. I told her he was my other brother, and she stepped back a little, before she angled her face towards me again, as if she were trying to keep him in view. And then she said she hadn’t known I’d had another brother. Looked as confused as I felt, only maybe she had more right. Maybe I really had never mentioned him. I just didn’t understand how I could never have mentioned him, how it was possible for Nia to know Rhys’ middle name and not know that there had always been three of us.

We didn’t stick around him. The plan had been for us to marathon all of that year’s Christmas episodes from the shows we watched, but she excused herself before we were even ten minutes into Doctor Who, said she needed the bathroom. And then she was in there for long enough that my computer went into standby mode. When she finally returned, she was clutching her phone, hard. Blanched knuckles hard. That in itself was weird, because she’d never had any shame about being on her phone while we were watching things before.

It got even worse when we went down for dinner. I’m not sure she even looked at her curry. Somehow managed to eat the whole thing while staring at David. He mostly ignored her in return, but every time he did glance towards her, I’d think I could see that smirk trying to sneak back onto his face. That was roundabout the point when I assumed that she must have a crush on him, and he’d noticed it. At the time, that seemed to me like it explained everything. Especially the resentment that swept heat across my shoulders. I knew it was a juvenile thought at the time, but Nia was supposed to be _my_ friend. On top of that, I was fairly sure that David still had a girlfriend. And, if she was going to have to have a crush on one of my brothers, why did it have to be the one who’d spent years upsetting me like it was his job?

I waved to her when she left, like I always had, standing in the doorway, hoping the light wouldn’t bring too many insects in. She didn’t wave back. Just stared up at what I suppose might have been David’s window. I don’t know why. He was doing the washing up, so there wouldn’t have been anything for her to see there.

Nia was never the same after that night. Seemed it, sometimes. We’d be chatting on the phone and everything would be normal. And then she’d suddenly bring up David, and it’d all be wrong again. She didn’t even seem to be asking the right sorts of questions, things like whether or not he was single, or if he liked any of the things we liked. Instead, it was always very generic sort of stuff (how was he? had I seen him recently?) but the way she would ask would always be very pointed. It felt like she was trying to remind me that my own brother existed. It made me uncomfortable, and I didn’t understand it, and when I tried to challenge her on it, there would always be this long pause. The sort where there’s just so much not-saying that it’s like you can feel the silence stretching down through the rest of time. Everything would go quiet. No static on the line, no breathing from Nia’s end, not enough from mine. And she’d never answer my questions properly. She’d excuse herself or tell me my line had dropped out or change the subject, anything to not acknowledge what I’d said.

I don’t think I ever told her any of what she wanted to hear, either. It was difficult. I had no idea what words, what collection of sounds would get her to stop being like this. Every time we spoke it would be the same. I called her less and less, because our conversations felt like wearing an old familiar jumper backwards.

I asked David about it once, in one of the rare phone conversations we had during his third year. He didn’t even remember who Nia was. I had to remind him, and even then, I think he might have just been humouring me. I don’t know. We weren’t close. I couldn’t ever tell when he was lying.

The last time I invited Nia over, I hadn’t realised he’d be there. I was used to him not being there, and somehow that was still stuck in my head, that rather than the piles of junk he’d had to leave in the corner of the utility room, stuff I tripped over every time I went to use the washing machine. I’m sure he must have brought back more stuff after graduating than he’d taken with him. Maybe I forgot he was home because he still wasn’t there a lot, even if he was living at home. He’d got himself a job at some fast food place or something.

I didn’t even notice when he got home. Nia and I were playing Mario Kart at the time, one of the courses where you really have to pay attention or you’ll be in eighth place by the time you’re fished out of oblivion and deposited back on the road. I crossed the finish line first, and it was only then that I noticed that Nia’s half of the screen wasn’t moving. Yoshi was sitting there in his weird egg-mobile, stationary in the middle of the track.

When I looked around, I saw the controller hanging from Nia’s arm by the wrist strap, swaying slightly from side to side. Her face was turned away from me, and she was staring at David. He was in the doorway, leaning there like he was watching the game, but there was nothing to see on the screen now but Yoshi, all alone on the course. Every now and again, he’d let out one of his weird helium-noises. To me, they sounded increasingly frantic.

Nia looked at me, then at David, and back again. Then her eyes caught on something between us, and she just frowned near-vacantly in the general direction of the mantelpiece.

No one spoke. I switched off the console, and tugged Nia through into the kitchen, away from my brother. She sat heavily in one of the chairs, and behind us, the light went on in the front room as my brother made his way inside. I heard the noise of the switch, and the metallic flickering of the one bulb that needed changing, and then there was quiet. On the tiles in front of me, the shadows shifted, for a moment unfamiliar, stretched beyond reason, before they settled with the play of the light.

I sat opposite Nia, and neither of us said anything for a long time. She didn’t look at me. Instead, she considered the photo collage on the wall, filled with pictures of our family and the dogs we’d had when I was little. We must have spent nearly an hour like that before she spoke.

“Did he always look like that?” she asked.

“Yes,” I replied. Didn’t look at her. I was too conscious of the silence between us and David, of how he must be able to hear every word of what we were saying. I should have taken her upstairs. “No. I don’t know. No one always looks like anything, do they? Except, I suppose he’s always looked like my brother.”

“Right,” she said. Pulled the word into a new shape that set my teeth on edge. “OK. It’s just, I could have _sworn_...”

She stopped saying things again, and so did I. At one point, she headed up to the bathroom, and I stayed sitting at the kitchen table until I had heard, counted through, every creak of her feet on the stairs. Fourteen steps. Then the door, opening and closing. The lock turning from vacant to engaged.

Then I went to go and look for David, and he was gone. The light was still on in the front room, but he wasn’t in there anymore. I made a slow, methodical circuit of the house, and there was no sign of him anywhere. No blood, no nothing. Just gone.

I know he must be dead by now. There’s been no body found, but I suppose there must be one out there somewhere. The police concluded that he must have gone up into the Brecon Beacons, and no one who’s not a trained survivalist is going to stay alive up there for too long. I guess I agree with them. I don’t believe that anyone can live in this world and not be seen by _something_. And there was no sign of him on CCTV, no charges on his bank cards, no sightings.

This must be quite mundane, compared to the sorts of things you usually get. Other people probably have vampires and werewolves and ghosts, something exciting, and I just have a brother who was there one moment and gone the next. But I need you to understand that I didn’t hear him go. I would have. I would have heard the door opening. All of the ways out of that house make noise, unless he had an as-yet undiscovered shrinking superpower and made it out of the utility room window. It was impossible for him to leave without me knowing about, but he did. And I’m not sure if that’s supernatural, exactly. I mean, my therapist says what I’m describing sounds like it, that was why she told me to come. I checked the definition of supernatural anyway, and I suppose it does go against the laws of nature, at the very least.

I blamed Nia for a long time. I’m not sure that I ever stopped. It was very easy to blame Nia. She wasn’t there to defend herself. Went home after she’d finished in the bathroom, and I never saw her again, never spoke to her again. And it made a sort of sense to me at the time. I could never work out what she might have done or how she might have done it, but I knew she must have done _something_. The only strange thing about David had been her, and then he was gone.

I’m sorry if this isn’t the sort of thing you’re looking for. I’m sorry I missed so much. I feel like I’ve been spending all of my life not seeing enough, looking in the wrong direction, and that’s probably how the rest of it’ll go, too.

Statement ends.

Perhaps we should add a section to the Institute’s guidelines for submission, stating that if you have to check the definition of “supernatural” to make sure your statement qualifies, you shouldn’t bother to come in.

Martin’s follow-up with the family has yielded no new information. The Wilsons have no idea what happened to their son, though Rhys Wilson did say that he doubted his brother had been working in fast food because “he never came home smelling of chips”. Martin also attempted to contact Nia Joseph, but was informed by her mother that she has checked herself in at a psychiatric institution, something which she refused to provide further details on, before asking that we not attempt to contact her again.

Tim managed to get in contact with Angharad Wilson’s therapist, who confirmed that she had advised her patient to make a statement here, and said that she hoped it might provide some form of closure, given the nature of David Wilson’s disappearance. Apparently, when pressed further as to why she had directed Miss Wilson here, she also mentioned that her own recordings of her sessions with Miss Wilson had somehow become corrupted. If you ask me, she should be keeping her equipment in better order, and not wasting our time by convincing her patients that their experience was supernatural enough for them to make a statement.

Sasha has been unable to locate any further evidence concerning David Wilson's actual disappearance, though she did find several photos of Miss Wilson with her brother on social media, posted before his first meeting with Nia Joseph, during his second year of university. A few of them had likes and comments from Miss Joseph, which, according to Sasha, were probably left at the time – apparently, commenting on someone’s old pictures is “a bit weird”. This means that Miss Joseph was almost certainly aware of David Wilson’s existence before she met him. Miss Wilson’s failure to discern this only makes me more sceptical of her story, given that the only reason she has for believing that anything supernatural occurred is that she is sure she would have noticed her brother leaving. However, much of what she writes in the statement leads me to conclude that she was nowhere near as observant as she claims.

Recording ends.


End file.
